Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 40
You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,
your voice-thunder makes me very happy.
Roar, lion of the heart,
and tear me open.
Love swells and surges the ocean
and on your robe of stormcloud
sews rain designs.
Love is lightning,
and also the ahhh
we respond with.
Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
You are the spring.
We are grasses trailing in it.
You are the king coming by.
We are beggars along the road.
You are the voice we are echoes of.
You are calling for us now.
How could we not return?
Lovers in their brief delight
gamble both worlds away,
a century’s worth of work
for one chance to surrender.
Many slow-growth stages
build to quick bursts of blossom.
A thousand half-loves must be forsaken
to take one whole heart home.
You that prefer, like crows do,
winter’s chill and the empty limbs,
notice now this that fills with new leaves
and roses opening and the nightbird’s song.
Let your love dissolve also
into this season’s moment,
or when it is over,
you will buy lamp after lamp to find it.
I shoot a random arrow arcing up.
It falls and strikes a believer in the heart.
He angrily asks, Is this some secret design of yours
that has caused this accident?
No. The arrow I shot was from God’s desiring.
The accident came from there.
Calm and rational, I used to laugh at lovers.
Now I have become one,
dancing carefree in my misery,
it feels like this is how I have always been.
Since we see individuals,
we must not be inside the ONE.
Multiple, we make judgments:
good, bad, and somewhere in between.
That is how the ecstatic heart grows heavy.
I hear nothing in my ear
but your voice.
Heart has plundered mind
of all its eloquence.
Love writes a transparent calligraphy,
so on the empty page
my soul can read and recollect.
Joy moves always to new locations,
the ease of its flowing never freezing.
A long winter’s tale is over.
Now with each spring day a new story.
Any cup I hold fills with wine
that lovers drink.
Every word I say opens into mystery.
Any way I turn, I see brilliance.
When school and mosque and minaret
get torn down,
then dervishes can begin their community.
Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal
and betrayal into trust,
can any human being become part of the truth.
While you are still yourself,
you are blind to both worlds.
That ego-drunkenness will not let you see.
Only when you are cleansed of both,
will you cut the deep roots of fear and anger.
Your eyes, when they really see
a rose or an anemone,
flood the wheeling world with tears.
Wine that stands a thousand years in a jar
tastes less mad than love only one year old.
Chapter 51
Andromeda: The Chained Queen
In the Andromeda constellation is M31, the Andromeda galaxy, which is the major galaxy nearest to us. It is moving toward us at 500,000 kilometers an hour. In about 3 billion years the two galaxies will begin colliding and go on merging for a billion more years in a very complex gravitational pavane. It may be that the black holes at the center of each galaxy will eventually become one.
Drumsound rises on the air,
its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat says,
I know you are tired, but come.
This is the way.
Stars burn clear all night till dawn.
Do that yourself,
and a spring will rise in the dark
with water your deepest thirst is for.
Do not sleep now.
Let the turning night wheel through this circle.
Your brow, the moon, this lantern we sit with.
Stay awake with these lights.
Do not sleep.
If you want what visible reality can give,
you are an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you are not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you will be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want
is love’s confusing joy.
Gamble everything for love,
if you are a true human being.
If not, leave this gathering.
Half-heartedness does not reach into majesty.
You set out to find God,
then you keep stopping for long periods
at mean-spirited roadhouses.
In a boat down a fast-running creek,
it feels like trees on the bank are rushing by.
What seems to be changing around us
is rather the speed of our craft
leaving this world.
What is this that gives pleasure in a form,
then when not, turns dull, opaque?
This thing that slips away into infinity,
then strikes down to take another shape?
I say,
I will lift from your hand like a pigeon.
You say,
It will be my love that opens your wings.
I say,
Totally humble, like a dog
I will lay down at your feet.
Such glory for you,
you say.
The soul must suffer secrets that cannot be said,
public humiliation, people pointing in contempt.
While you are a human being,
stay inside the scorn.
Work there patiently with the others.
When you are pure spirit, quickly, leave.
Love is the way messengers
from the mystery tell us things.
Love is the mother.
We are her children.
She shines inside us,
visible-invisible, as we trust
or lose trust, or feel it start to grow again.
Childhood, youth, maturity,
and now old age.
Every guest agrees to stay
three days, no more.
Master, you told me
to remind you. Time to go.
Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse
to give this joy to anyone?
Fish do not hold the sacred liquid in cups.
They swim the huge, fluid freedom.
Cypress moving, still, completely awake,
autumn’s wing does not brush against you,
nor does the cruel wanting of those eyes.
You are a joining point for sky and ground,
soul as witness, green compassion.
Your confidence does not matter in this place
where the minute you come in, you must place a bet,
and it is your move.
Either you will be checkmated,
or you will win, or you both will win.
Dawn. As light becomes morning,
night-beings leave.
Your eyes, which have been closed to protect themselves,
open, looking for deeper dissolving.
It is as dangerous to refuse to help those traveling through your life
as it is to deny that the unseen worlds exist.
You do not know such secrets as this;
therefore you assume there are none.
A lover haunts the desert places
where the friend once put up a tent.
A lover looks for traces left on the ground.
Another kind of devotion
stays busy with rosary and ritual prayer.
Then he or she goes for bread.
The thirsty lover runs to water. The other is hungry.
Study the difference between hunger and thirst.
This is how it is with love: You take a bite,
you chew, you digest, then you start singing.
Grapes come unripe to the vineyard,
then gradually grow ready to be crushed for wine.
There is an appropriate progress to the spring.
You hear cats yowling. Later, a nightingale begins.
When you are poured in my empty glass,
those who have been living here invisibly
appear before me, as companions.
But those from the mosque and the tavern,
the conventionally religious and the conventionally ecstatic,
keep their distance.
Someone who does not make flowers makes thorns.
If you are not building rooms
where wisdom can be openly spoken,
you are building a prison.
If I hold you with my emotions,
you will become a wished-for companion.
If I hold you with my eyes,
you will grow old and die.
So I hold you here
where we both mix with the infinite.
Midnight, but your forehead shines with dawn.
You dance as you come to me
and curl by curl undo the dark.
Let jealousy end.
I could not have known what love is
if I had never felt this longing.
Anything done to excess becomes boring,
except this overflow that moves toward you.
The soul fell into the soup of nature
and started mixing with all manner
of delicious, and not so tasty, ingredients.
Our actions take on a tinge
of those we are near.
God keep us from bitter company.
Be clear and smiling
for those who are glad to see you.
Someone who is not, let his way darken
like a pen leaving a faltering ink trail.
Chapter 52
Scorpio: The Scorpion
Scorpio, in myth, is often associated with Orion, the great hunter, who brags one day that he will kill all the wild animals on earth. Apollo, who is responsible for guarding the herds, asks Gaia, the protector, to send a giant scorpion with impenetrable armor to sting and kill Orion. In one variation of the story he succeeds. In another, Orion swims out to sea to escape, only to be shot by Artemis, who is also allied with the animals.
Lo, I am with you always,
you promised that,
and when I realized that it was true,
my soul flared up.
Any unhappiness comes from forgetting.
Remember, and be back close
with the friend.
There is a banquet where grains of wheat
sit and eat and shout for more,
and more is brought.
These banqueter seed grains
never quit eating, and for eternity
the table stays replete.
You have so distracted me,
your absence fans my love.
Do not ask how.
Then you come near.
Do not . . . , I say
and Do not . . . , you answer.
Do not ask why
this delights me.
Real value comes with madness,
matzoob below, scientist above.
Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief
disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.
A bough with blossoms bears fruit.
The hawk descends with purpose.
Your image comes and goes
here inside me. Will you stay?
Poem, song, and story, the stream sweeps by,
moving along what was never mine anyway.
What I have done through an act of will,
well-meaning or mean, these are brought in briefly
by moonlight, then carried obscurely off.
Roses shine in the clay
beside your tomb.
Be aware, earth,
who sleeps inside you.
Spring lightning, poems being sung.
The drum gets quiet, but voices continue.
Venus appears,
bringing her gift to the music.
This season with the friend so near,
the body dims.
Heart-light grows more intense.
Stormclouds finally weep,
because the lightning has started to laugh.
With heavy tears everywhere coming down,
the fields get uncontrollably tickled.
The angel of death arrives,
and I spring joyfully up.
No one knows what comes over me
when I and that messenger speak.
When you come back inside my chest,
no matter how far I have wandered off,
I look around and see the way.
At the end of my life, with just one breath left,
if you come then, I will sit up and sing.
I called through your door, The mystics
are gathering in the street. Come out.
Leave me alone. I am sick.
I don’t care if you are dead.
Jesus is here,
and he wants to resurrect somebody.
I set my heart out on the road
where it can be troubled.
I untie my feet, so I can run after you.
Now today with your fragrance in the air,
I give my love to the wind.
As the fig seller loves to sell figs,
so my soul, and yours, love to die
into the resurrection that comes
with every taste of this friendship.
It is just who we are.
Whatever is cooking us
draws us every night
into the tavern of absence.
Being cut off from who we were,
we become friendship itself.
I, you, he, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers,
these are not true distinctions.
From cane reeds, sugar.
From a worm’s cocoon, silk.
Be patient if you can,
and from sour grapes
will come something sweet.
Morning breeze, bring news of beauty,
but slowly, please.
Let the fresh fragrance stay.
O heart, brighten yourself.
Here is Joseph’s shirt.
Hold it against your face.
Rub your eyes with it.
Let them see again.
Little fish, O heart,
you cannot live without water.
Throw yourself back into the river.
You are inside every prayer,
in the deep listening of any sema,
inside every impulse to fast, every hajj.
I am the one who plays today.
You are the beautiful one,
the candle lit in Teraz,
and the source of these gifts
that keep falling from the sky.
Chapter 53
Sagittarius: The Archer
